DuckDuckGo Sees Massive Growth In Post-Snowden World

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-oriented search engine, has been around for over six years. But when Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA surveillance in 2013, DuckDuckGo started a period of strong growth that hasn't slowed yet. The search engine has seen a 600% increase in traffic over the past two years, and they're now serving 3 billion searches a year. This shouldn't be a surprise — last month, a Pew survey found that 40% of American adults didn't want their search engine to retain information about them. But members of the general public are notoriously slow to change their privacy-related behavior. DuckDuckGo's growing popularity has led them to double their employee count since early 2014, now totaling 28 people. Their success is beginning to fuel speculation about an acquisition, with Apple's name being tossed around as a potential buyer.

Comments

Re:Dunning–Kruger effect

[s.petry]

To me it is simple, you want anonymity but refuse to respect that rights of others who want the same.

No, it has nothing to do with me being anonymous. That phrase "do not expect" is a reservation, not a refusal. It has nothing to do with me being anonymous, it's about a person responding to the post being anonymous.

Further, the statement has nothing to do with being negative about anonymous posts except that it's impossible to hold a conversation when a potentially infinite amount of people appear to be identical.